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The first annual Western Interdisciplinary Student Symposium on Language Research (WISSLR): a symposium for students of all levels to present their original, interdisciplinary research on language.

Call for Papers

Western Interdisciplinary Student Symposium on Language Research (WISSLR)

The Graduate Program in Linguistics at the University of Western Ontario is pleased to present the first Western Interdisciplinary Student Symposium on Language Research (WISSLR), to be held March 6 (possibly 7), 2009. In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the Masters program at Western, we are pleased to invite students of all levels to submit abstracts on original research on language from a range of disciplinary approaches. Topics may come from such areas as Applied Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Psycholinguistics, Communication Disorders, Natural Language Processing, Linguistic Anthropology, Linguistic Interfaces, Philosophy of Language, and much more.

The symposium will be held at the University of Western Ontario, with the possibility of streaming live to the internet (using WebCT/ Wimba technology). We also welcome presentations from other locations via the same means (all software downloadable for conference participants).

Each participant will have 15 minutes for their presentation, and 5 minutes for questions and discussion. Students of all levels are encouraged to participate. Works in progress are welcome.

Please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words (plus title), to wisslruwo.ca, by Friday January 9, 2009. Successful applicants will be notified by Friday January 23, 2009. Please send your anonymous abstract as an attachment, and include your name, school, and whether you prefer to present in person or via the internet in the body of your email. Partial travel assistance may be available for some participants coming to London for this event.

The workshop is on language contact and language change in multiple and bimodal bilingual minorities.

Call for Papers

The workshop aims at exploring the language contact and language change phenomena that characterize multiple linguistic minorities. It focuses on but is not confined to signed, Uralic and Caucasian languages.

On the one hand, we intend to explore the situation of bimodal bilingualism. Data from changes in multi-modal bilingual contexts can lead to new insights into bilingualism, the typology and structure of languages, and language change and contact in general. Research into bimodal bilingualism can draw upon several methods and approaches developed for studying the bilingualism of other minority languages, and vice versa.

On the other hand, we know that it is difficult to reach the bilingual individuals and communities that are deaf and belong to several linguistic minorities. Therefore, we approach the bimodal target via individual studies on minority languages. More specifically, we concentrate on the issue of language change in contact in the context of a typologically wide range of minority languages. We are looking for answers to questions such as the following:

- How do deaf children of (hearing) parents belonging to linguistic minorities (e.g., Nganasan) communicate with the Deaf communities in their country and with their own parents? - How does their language change? - How can we test the change in the structure of the languages in contact in a uniform way? - What are the factors that influence the developments? - Can we work towards a typology?

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